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Behavior problems
February 11, 2011
Welcome to Tantrumville
My youngest daughter believes that she is 3 years old.
The mere suggestion that she is only 17 months old by changing her diaper, offering her toddler safe eating utensils, cutting her food or any other baby indignity is met with screeching, crying and an adamant “no!” or “mine!”
As far as temperments go, my girls couldn’t be more different. Big sister Ayanna, who really is 3, is easy going and needs to be pushed to try new things. Baby Elizabeth is a daredevil and adheres to the all or nothing approach.
For example, if I put ketchup on her plate to dip her potatoes, then clearly she was only meant to eat the ketchup. Refuse her demands to add more ketchup to her plate, then she will one up you and refuse to eat entirely. (I tried not giving her any ketchup at all, but if she sees anyone else at the table using condiments that will set her off as well.) If she find herself hungry in the middle of the night because she failed to eat her dinner, she will wail at the top of her lungs. If you make the mistake of going to her room to check on her, she will stop wailing long enough to make the sign for “eat” and then commence wailing again when you tell her no. .”
She assumes that if her demands are not met immediately, then clearly you can’t hear her and she just needs to yell louder. She may not win her battle of wills, but she makes everyone in the house pay for daring to contradict her, or as the case is at night, ignoring her requests for a midnight snack.
Ayanna is not a fan of baby sister’s methods.
“She’s scaring my ears. Pick her up!”
Thankfully, the more words Elizabeth has learned, the shorter the tantrums are. Around Christmas time it was not unusual for her to go 20 or 30 minutes, non-stop. No holding or consoling could help. With the exception of the late night food problem, we’re now down to a five minutes or so, but the intensity is still a force to be reckoned with, especially when you are just sitting down to dinner after a long day at work.
One day I will admire Elizabeth’s tenacity. Of course it might be a few decades. I predict the teenage years are going to be a doozy.
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September 2, 2010
Depression in preschoolers?
Two recent reports in the New York Times illustrate how widely the pendulum swings when it comes to small children and mental health issues.
The first, an article about depression in preschool-aged children, appeared last weekend in the New York Times Magazine. The writer describes the growing theory that children as young as 2 or 3 years old can in fact be clinically depressed. It also raises a number of questions:
Is it really possible to diagnose such a grown-up affliction in such a young child? And is diagnosing clinical depression in a preschooler a good idea, or are children that young too immature, too changeable, too temperamental to be laden with such a momentous label? Preschool depression may be a legitimate ailment, one that could gain traction with parents in the way that attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (A.D.H.D.) and oppositional defiant disorder (O.D.D.) — afflictions few people heard of 30 years ago — have entered the what-to-worry-about lexicon. But when the rate of development among children varies so widely and burgeoning personalities are still in flux, how can we know at what point a child crosses the line from altogether unremarkable to somewhat different to clinically disordered? Just how early can depression begin?
The article deals extensively with therapy options, but only mentions in passing the issue of medication. Probably for good reasons, because once you get past the diagnosis of a serious mental health problem in a child, there is then a menu of medication options — most of which are off-label uses in young kids and the full effects are not known.
Then comes today’s article about the dangers of using psychosis drugs in children.
More than 500,000 children and adolescents in America are now taking antipsychotic drugs, according to a September 2009 report by the Food and Drug Administration. Their use is growing not only among older teenagers, when schizophrenia is believed to emerge, but also among tens of thousands of preschoolers.A Columbia University study recently found a doubling of the rate of prescribing antipsychotic drugs for privately insured 2- to 5-year-olds from 2000 to 2007. Only 40 percent of them had received a proper mental health assessment, violating practice standards from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
“There are too many children getting on too many of these drugs too soon,” Dr. Mark Olfson, professor of clinical psychiatry and lead researcher in the government-financed study, said.
The most interesting part of the second article is not whether these disorders exist in kids (the general consensus is yes, but perhaps not in the numbers diagnosed), it’s that medication is the lower cost solution for desperate and frazzled parents. Psychotherapy and family therapy are expensive and not covered as well as pills.
Dr. Lawrence L. Greenhill, president of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, concerned about the lack of research, has recommended a national registry to track preschoolers on antipsychotic drugs for the next 10 years. “Psychotherapy is the key to the treatment of preschool children with severe mental disorders, and antipsychotics are adjunctive therapy — not the other way around,” he said.But it is cheaper to medicate children than to pay for family counseling, a fact highlighted by a Rutgers University study last year that found children from low-income families, like Kyle, were four times as likely as the privately insured to receive antipsychotic medicines.
Texas Medicaid data obtained by The New York Times showed a record $96 million was spent last year on antipsychotic drugs for teenagers and children — including three unidentified infants who were given the drugs before their first birthdays.
In many cases, the choice to medicate is one of last resort: faced with no-tolerance policies at school and child care and high-stakes testing, not mention physical safety concerns for the children and other family members.
For some parents, too much is at stake to not medicate, and the suggestion often comes directly from doctors. And doctors are often not consulted until the problems have reached some sort of crisis (i.e. the child has been expelled or suspended from daycare or school, a new sibling has been born, etc.)
In families where cost, lack of workplace flexibility and limited child care options are a factor, the family therapy component can easily fall to the wayside.
In the case of the family featured in the Times article, it appears that while there was no psychosis, there were developmental and other issues that therapy was needed to address.
Even if there is the desire, therapy can be hard to get. The waiting lists for mental health services is long, and even in Austin, there are only a handful of doctors that take low-income patients of preschool age. And then there are lengthy waiting lists.
What does a parent do in the meantime? Medicate.
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October 22, 2009
Yelling, as bad as spanking?
According to the New York Times, shouting at the kids might be as damaging as spanking.
However, even they admit that there’s relatively little research on the subject. That doesn’t mean there aren’t consultants willing to charge parents for classes on how to change their yelling ways.
The article quotes one such person:
“I’ve worked with thousands of parents and I can tell you, without question, that screaming is the new spanking,” said Amy McCready, the founder of Positive Parenting Solutions, which teaches parenting skills in classes, individual coaching sessions and an online course. “This is so the issue right now. As parents understand that it’s not socially acceptable to spank children, they are at a loss for what they can do. They resort to reminding, nagging, timeout, counting 1-2-3 and quickly realize that those strategies don’t work to change behavior. In the absence of tools that really work, they feel frustrated and angry and raise their voice. They feel guilty afterward, and the whole cycle begins again.”
Yes, I do sound dubious. To me, discipline is like watching your diet. Overdo any type of food and it’s bound to be bad for you. Rely too much on one type of discipline and, yes, there’s a good chance there are negative consequences for your kids.
Sometimes you have to yell to get a kid’s attention, especially on matters of safety. It’s also good for them to see you get angry once in a while as part of the normal range of human emotions. It is not good for them to see you angry all the time.
Sending a kid to time out for every infraction, is just a likely to become ineffective, although probably less psychologically damaging. And spanking? Well, my personal take is that it can be part of the parenting toolkit — but should be used sparingly, with restraint and never out of anger. (Not a popular sentiment, I know.) Even removing privileges will cease to be effective, if the length of time is too long, or if it happens too frequently.
What do you think? Is yelling as bad as spanking?
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October 7, 2009
When kids lie
My kindergartener is currently sitting in her room, where she might be for the rest of the night.
She was sent to the principal’s office today, yet she still hasn’t admitted to me or her father what she did. I had to call the teacher to sort out the details.
It seems that at nap time, young Ava colored on the carpet around her mat. Once the teacher saw the coloring, she asked Ava if she had done it. No confession. She kept her in during art class. No confession. She sent her to the principal’s office… finally a confession… but at home, a blank look when asked about why she was in the principal’s office.
I don’t like having to call the teacher to find out what my daughter isn’t telling me. I don’t like the fact that she thinks lying is better than admitting her wrongs.
So she’s sitting in her room and we’re waiting for her confession and she’ll be waiting a long time for allowance or Xbox or TV.
What would you do?
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September 16, 2009
Disciplining other people's kids?
This is the second time I’ve seen a story like this in as many weeks.
According to the Associated Press, an Ohio woman was arrested after taking it upon herself to spank a stranger’s 2-year-old in a Salvation Army. Last week it was a report by CNN about a Georgia man who decided to smack a 2-year-old who was crying in a WalMart while her mother stood by.
OK. First, are you kidding me? Kudos to the parents for showing more restraint than I might have. I fear I might be facing assault charges myself or bailing my husband out of jail for the same, if someone we didn’t know laid a hand on one of our kids.
That aside, there are more subtle instances when strangers to feel the need to intervene with other people’s children, either because they fear the child might injure herself or someone else, or because the behavior is beyond inappropriate.
Perhaps because my kids are so small, I try to limit confrontation as much as possible. If asking the other child to stop doesn’t work, I’m inclined to look for a responsible adult and if that fails, I remove myself and my kids from the situation. If the behavior is a safety hazard, I would be inclined to tell a store manager and let him or her deal with the problem.
Have you or someone you know chosen to discipline a stranger’s child? Why?
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June 30, 2009
Cell phones and kids who cheat?
The more I read about ‘tweens and cell phones, the more I suspect Ayanna may not get one until she can pay for it.
Between sexting and some of the rude behaviors at restaurants with kids texting and gaming during meals, cell phones seem to me to be more of a pain than they are worth.
Granted my two-year-old daughter is in no near danger of acquiring a phone, and my view is colored by the fact that as a child our house was the last one on the street to get cable — a calamity for me, but in my old age I suspect that my parents might have been on to something.
My ruminations on cell phones come after reading this piece from Motherlode blogger Lisa Belkin about kids using their phones to cheat and their parents being clueless in the interim.
According to a recent survey a third of kids admit they cheat at school using their phones, but only 3 percent of parents think their kid would do such a thing.
So what’s a parent to do? Is the appeal of being able to reach a kid at a moments notice or teaching them the responsibility of keeping up with a phone worth the hassle?
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May 15, 2009
'But, I have to win!'
My 5-year-old threw a fit over an online checkers game the other morning. In her world, losing that game was worse than death itself. She was inconsolable for a good half hour, making getting her in the car and off to school a challenge.
In an everybody-gets-a-trophy generation, it’s refreshing that this game wasn’t giving points out for good tries. For a moment, winning was really important.
We want our children to learn lessons such as you don’t always win and sometimes you have to work hard to come out on top and you won’t be always perfect or great at everything. These are hard lessons, especially when you’re 5 and you’re always trying to compete against an older brother who is naturally great at games.
After her morning fit, she returned to the game that afternoon, determined to figure out how to win. Sometimes winning, sometimes not, but knowing that sometimes she could beat the computer and feel really smart.
Do you think children should get points for second place? Are you a fan of the everybody-gets-a-trophy philosophy? Or is being able to win or lose really important?
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April 27, 2009
Fighting toddler aversions with fun
Almost all toddlers have aversions of one brand or another. Some hate red foods; other are opposed to eating certain textures. Some don’t want to get their heads wet. Some won’t touch certain kinds of surfaces - cold, wet, rough or crunchy.
Our daughter Ayanna, not quite two-years-old, has aversions in that last category. And while most kids do grow out of their aversions, they tend to run in my husband’s family. So we’ve been keeping an eye on her quirks.
Our Easter egg hunt a few weeks ago fell apart because she didn’t want to touch the refrigerated, hard boiled eggs. The day before. she had a high time dying those same eggs, but they were room temperature. Easter morning she reached down to pick up the first brightly colored egg she saw and ran crying to my lap. No amount of urging, coaxing or demonstration could prove that they were safe to touch, so the hunt was closed for the year.
Then there is the shoe issue. Despite being fine with being barefoot last summer (although she wasn’t walking particularly well at year old), this spring she has refused to walk on any outdoor surface that isn’t smooth. No grass, no pebble-specked concrete, and apparently leaves on the deck are an abomination to humanity.
This means that she gets approximately 10 feet from our front door, drops to her hands and knees and then starts crying for her shoes. If you stick her in the grass, she retracts her feet as if they were landing gear and then wails like we were trying to pull her toenails out.
The best advice at this age, experts say, is to keep exposing them to new environments and situations. For most kids it’s about learning to deal with the unfamiliar. and so my husband and I spent the weekend on some homegrown occupational therapy.
Saturday was a disaster. We finally got her to walk about 10 feet on the grass to reach me. The bribe: her shoes and socks. On Sunday, we had much better luck. We made it more about the game she was missing out on than being shoeless.
We let her cry on the sidewalk, while Dave and I (sans shoes, of course) walked, marched and jumped on the grass with gusto in the front yard. Pretty soon she figured out that Mom and Dad would march and jump on command - her command. The power went to her head, and she pretty quickly forgot about the yucky, prickly grass beneath her feet.
Anyone driving past our house might have wondered what was going on. I’m sure it was a sight - the pregnant lady and a grown man whirling on the lawn with the toddler. But a good time was had by all, and the best pay off for this mom was having to wash Ayanna’s very dirty feet.
What kind of aversions have your kids had?
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April 21, 2009
Are your kids part of 'The Narcissism Epidemic'?
From the ‘Today’ show: authors Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell track the growing me, me, me attitude among college kids and twentysomethings in their book ‘The Narcissism Epidemic.’ Their findings:
“The rise in narcissism is accelerating, with scores rising faster in the 2000s than in previous decades. By 2006, 1 out of 4 college students agreed with the majority of the items on a standard measure of narcissistic traits. Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), the more severe, clinically diagnosed version of the trait, is also far more common than once thought. Nearly 1 out of 10 of Americans in their twenties, and 1 out of 16 of those of all ages, has experienced the symptoms of NPD.”
Read an excerpt from the book here.
How do we get our kids to not be self-centered? Is this part of the “everybody gets a trophy” generation? Do your kids give to charities? Do volunteer work?
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March 21, 2009
When kids cuss
Toddlers are natural parrots, which can be sort of cute if all they are saying is “Polly wants a cracker.”
This week one of my co-workers, Nicole Mills, came over to tell me her horror that her 23-month-old daughter Sophie had learned proper usage and inflection of the F-bomb.
Even worse, she said,”Everyone in my family is going to know that it’s my fault.”
Apparently Nicole thought she had double-paid her mortgage for the month, and at the thought of impending financial doom she let the colorful curse word fall from her lips. To her credit, Nicole has made valiant efforts to keep her adult vocabulary away from her daughter. She says it’s only the second time she’s said that word in front of Sophie. (I, sadly, cannot claim the same thing.)
But in the days following, the F-word has been on repeat by the toddler at her house and not quietly. Sophie has decided to be loud and proud about her new favorite word.
First Nicole tried explaining that it was a “mommy word” that only adults use. Then she tried to put the word on ignore. At last check Sophie had used it again on Friday, but no sign of the offending word today. So maybe there is hope.
Unfortunately I see my future, despite efforts to cure myself of foul language with curse jars, giving up swearing for Lent two years running and lecturing my husband periodically on the collective looseness of our lips. A couple of weeks ago after a near miss with another car, I thought I heard Ayanna repeat what I said, but I can’t be sure. It could have been the word “duck,” right?
So tell us, what should Nicole and I do now? How do you teach young children that there are just some words they should not say?
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March 6, 2009
When you can't beat them . . . love them
Today’s Raising Austin story in Life & Arts by Maya Perez touches on discipline vs. child abuse.
So I ask, how do you discipline your children? What works, what doesn’t?
I grew up in the days of spanking. I have firm memories of my mother chasing one of us around the house with a Ping-Pong paddle in her hand or a wooden spoon. I’d choose spoon over paddle any day. I can tell you, that the spanking didn’t make me change my ways. It became almost a game to see how frustrated you could make Mom as she tried to catch you. What did work: being sent to my room or losing a privilege or worst yet, that look of disappointment in my mother’s face. My dad’s yelling certainly couldn’t deliver the same sting as my mother’s look.
Now, with my own children, we rarely spank. I won’t say never because occasionally I lose my cool and swat someone on the backside. What works for us is the mere threat of being sent to your room. And what really works for my 8-year-old son is a loss of computer time or a loss of allowance. My 5-year-old daughter’s a little more tricky, but she tends to cave when I get really quiet and indicate how disappointed I am with her.
My parents did a really good job of teaching me what doesn’t work: spanking, and what does work: consequences and disapproval.
What works for you? How has it changed as your children grow?
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February 3, 2009
Michael Phelps: What do parents do when a star crashes to earth
Another role model bites the dust, sort of.
Olympic swimming legend Michael Phelps was outed over the weekend by British tabloids with a photo of him smoking pot at a college house party.
What his corporate sponsors ultimately decide to do, will hinge up how big of a hit this incident is to Phelps’ status as a role model. The script during the Olympics was son of single mom does really good despite having ADD/ADHD. So, does pot smoking and that DWI arrest back in 2004 do him in as a pitch man?
Maybe not. Since Phelps only pitches products he uses, most of his corporate target audience are his age, not the teen or kiddie sets.
According to this AP article. apparel company Speedo, luxury Swiss watchmaker Omega and sports beverage PureSport all say they support him. But other big sponsors, such as Visa Inc. and Kellogg Co., aren’t talking yet.
And that makes sense. Kellogg, with its slate of kids cereals, has a whole lot more to lose from Phelps’ indiscretions than a European watchmaker.
Should people and corporate sponsors cut Phelps a break? Is there a way for parents to make Phelps a cautionary tale?
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February 2, 2009
The misery of learning social skills
Going to first grade has meant a fair amount of tears for my 6-year-old son.
Josh is a good boy. He’s sensitive and very smart. He’s very creative, frequently drawing and making spaceships out of his 5 million Legos.
But Josh has this thing, this really annoying thing that drives his classmates nuts. He has no sense of personal space. He is always running up to other kids, shouting happily in their faces. Sometimes he doesn’t even use words, but screams gems like “BLEHHHHHH!” and “RARRRRRR!”
In Josh language, this means hello.
Sometimes the other students join in. Other times, they want nothing to do with him.
This morning at school, Josh saw this little girl we’ll call Jane.
“Look!” Josh shouted. “There’s Jane!”
Josh immediately ran up to Jane, howling some version of her name. Jane wanted nothing to do with him. She scowled and veered away from him without a word.
Some kids would take that as a sign to leave their friend alone. Not Josh. To him, this is his cue to chase her down and make ridiculous jokes until she is forced to acknowledge him.
So as Jane hurried down the hallway, Josh set off to follow her. That’s when I grabbed his backpack and pulled him toward me.
“EXCUSE ME!” he yelled. “I’m trying to go.”
I stared at him with that Mother X-Ray Vision and saw he was upset. He can’t consciously understand it, but he’s hurt. He doesn’t like being snubbed. He wants affirmation.
Holding on to Josh’s shoulders, I peered into his eyes and said, “Josh, what is the matter? You were fine a second ago. Now you’re all upset.”
He didn’t say a word. Instead, he buried his face in my jacket and cried.
In the world of daily parenting, is there anything worse than that?
We’ve all been snubbed, ignored and insulted. I can’t even think about middle school without getting the willies.
But as a mom, you pray so hard that your kid won’t have to go through that. Unfortunately, that’s impossible — especially when you have a son like Josh.
So as Josh cried this morning, I just hugged him and told him that next time, he could just say hi to Jane instead of assaulting her so aggressively. I told him about a time not so long ago (like two months ago) when I tried to talk to someone for work and the guy completely and intentionally walked past me without a word.
This, of course, made him feel better. But not much.
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August 27, 2008
Fed up with your kid? Don't drive off
A Fort Worth dad and columnist had one of those moments a few weeks ago. The ones where you are just so fed up with an unreasonable kid that you run out of ideas on how to cope.
In this case, Dave Lieber drove off, leaving his 11-year-old son high and dry at a suburban McDonald’s for a few minutes. Long enough for patrons, who overheard the family spat that precipitated the dad’s angry departure, to call the police. He wrote a column about it talking about the seriousness of his actions.
But yesterday charges were filed for child endangerment and abandonment — both felonies. And based on the banter in the morning news meeting, few of us knew it could be a crime and most of us knew a similar real-life episode.
The ‘tween years are tough when it comes to discipline. The methods that work for younger kids (i.e. timeout, distraction, reasoned explanation) just don’t cut it for that age group. And generally they don’t have access to the same sorts of freedoms (cars, dates, outings with friends) that make appealing carrots for older children.
So what do you do? And do you think Leiber was within his parental rights?
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